


a monument to all your sins

by Kyhariel



Series: a monument/your requiem/my throne [1]
Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Genderqueer Character, Hanahaki Disease, Other, Sorry Not Sorry, even if its never named, i took the destiny lore and picked my favorite parts, no happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-06-25 14:06:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15642291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyhariel/pseuds/Kyhariel
Summary: Leonidas, a fairly new warlock meets an old warlock and gets in over their head.





	a monument to all your sins

**Author's Note:**

> yeah, so. fair warning, i really did pick my favorite bits of destiny lore for this. if bungie says the grimoire is folklore i can do what i want.

Leo was barely a kinderguardian anymore when they saw him for the first time.  
Of course, they had heard his name before, said with the same kind of reverence Osiris was held in, both the unchallenged experts in their respective fields.  
He was storming across the tower courtyard, power coiled within his wiry frame, black hair threatening to spill out of a loose ponytail.  
Two harried looking warlocks were following him, the three of them arguing about something Leo hadn’t heard about before.  
Isildur-14, the titan that was still helping Leo get acclimated to being a guardian, nudged them as she saw them staring after him and the warlocks following him.  
“That’s Toland. He’s one of the reasons other guardians are so biased against you warlocks. Nothing against you of course, he’s just, like, profoundly weird.”, Isildur explained.  
Then, she shrugged and went off towards the vanguard hall.  
Leo was preoccupied staring after Toland and his entourage, but hurried after Isildur, as they noticed that she had already left.

The second time Leo encountered him was out in the field.  
They had taken a collection patrol, requesting research material for some warlock – hive scales, for whatever reason. Leo hoped that whoever wanted them wasn’t picky about the particular hive they came from, as Leo was just barely able to differentiate different broods of hive when not shooting them.  
That said, Leo went and got the requested amount of scales. Their ghost informed control and they got told, “Yeah, these are for Toland, he should be somewhere near you? Could you be a dear and bring them to him?”  
Leo shrugged and confirmed, waiting for Toland’s coordinates.  
As soon as they got them, apparently he had set up camp somewhere, Leo was up on their sparrow and driving towards him.  
He wasn’t there when Leo arrived, so they just looked around for a spot to leave the scales at and get away again.  
They didn’t have that much luck, as he came back while they were looking around the camp.  
“Ah, finally! What took you so long? Wait, don’t answer.”, he said in rapid succession while walking up to Leo, an automatic rifle strung on his back.  
Toland took the scales out of Leo’s hand and peered at them intently, at least that’s what Leo thought he did, given that he was wearing a helmet (that had an actual, literal ram skull on it).  
“Do you remember which morphs of hive these are from? Which broods?”, he asked, looking up at Leo and stepping closer, ignoring the pesky little thing known as personal space.  
He leaned down into Leo’s face. Leo could not discern what he actually wanted, being unable to see his face and all that.  
But he righted himself and stepped back again.  
“Ah, you probably don’t even know what a hive brood is, do you?”, he asked before turning away and throwing the scales haphazardly on a table.  
Leo’s cheeks began to burn. Were they so obviously new at this?  
“You’re free to leave.”, Toland said without looking up from the work station opposite the table, examining… something. That smelled like hive.  
Leo, feeling sheepish, turned and left the warlock alone.

The third time Leo met him (and wasn’t three times the charm?), Leo was standing at the railing of the tower plaza, staring up into the night sky, watching the stars and the dormant Traveler.  
Toland walked right up next to Leo and leaned against the railing next to them.  
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”, he sighed, also staring up.  
When Leo didn’t respond, he continued: “You’re the kinderguardian who brought me the scales the other day, yes?”, he asked, turning to look at Leo.  
Understandably, Leo was a bit weary of him. Toland hadn’t been the most polite person the last time they met.  
So, Leo only glanced over when they replied, hesitantly: “Y-yeah?”  
Toland smiled at them and Leo really looked at him and felt/thought the following two things, simultaneously: the feeling prey gets when a predator is watching them and, more importantly: Oh No, he looks Good.  
“You’re a warlock, yes? Don’t you want to learn more? About the Light? The Darkness?”, Toland asked Leo, still smiling.  
Leo had the distinct feeling there was only one right answer to this question, so they said exactly that:  
“Yes, of course.”  
He nodded and began: “My current problem is, I don’t have an assistant and I desperately need one. The last few were… inadequate and Osiris, our dear Vanguard is most unhelpful in finding a new one, so I thought I’d try it myself.”  
Leo was nodding along, never quite taking their eyes off Toland.  
“Everyone is so incompetent. So, I figured, if I taught an assistant from scratch, well, that’s as good as it gets, right?”, he continued explaining.  
Leo just kept nodding along, slowly understanding where this was going. They also got the feeling that maybe, just maybe, they shouldn’t refuse whatever offer Toland would make. Especially as Toland’s smile grew into a grin and they felt very trapped between two peculiar feelings: “I think he is going to eat me” and “I want him to eat me”. They did not know what feeling of the two they preferred.  
“So, would you like to be my assistant, little warlock?”, he asked and sought Leo’s gaze, looking straight into their eyes.  
And, oh Traveler, his eyes were so beautifully green, like a deep lush forest in the summer haze. Leo got the very, very bad feeling they could loose themselves in these eyes forever.  
Later, when Leo would look back on this moment, they would wonder why they hadn’t just walked away. It would be the first stupid decision in a whole serious of very stupid decisions.  
This would be the first step towards a horrible future.  
Of course, the kinderguardian Leo did not know that yet.  
They were, as far as they were concerned, caught between a rock and a hard place and only one answer, they figured, could get them out of it.  
So, they nodded.  
Toland’s grin, if even possible, seemed to get even wider.  
“Fantastic! I’m sure you know my name, but let me introduce myself regardless. I am the warlock Toland, sometimes called Toland the Shattered by colleagues who envy my success. And what is your name, little warlock?”  
“L-leonidas. But you can call me Leo.”, they said and rubbed their neck.  
“Leo. Splendid. I have a little lab, near the cryptarchy, we’ll start, say, at ten am tomorrow?”, he asked, grinning like he had just won a great prize and Leo helplessly just nodded.  
“Then we will see each other tomorrow! Good night, my dear assistant.”, he said, patting Leo on the shoulder and then walking away towards the quarters.  
Leo watched him leave and though on repeat: Oh no. This was a mistake.

As it turned out, the next day, and the next couple of weeks, 10am was an incredibly generous estimate of when Toland would be awake to do much of anything.  
He was, plainly put, a disaster of a person, even if his research was brilliant.  
Leo could well and truly understand why he had so much trouble with assistants.  
It was a lucky day if he was even awake before twelve. He lived on enough caffeine to kill a regular person. (Aria, his ghost, had told Leo that Osiris had strictly forbidden Toland to buy caffeine from his research grants. He had to get his own glimmer for that. Leo suspected that was why he still did missions at all.) His notes? They were chaotic at best and indecipherable at worst. And that was when he wasn’t writing in actual hive runes. On the upside of that, Leo had learned pretty quickly to read hive runes.  
The reason his sleep schedule was so messed up was that he worked until early in the morning, seemingly forgetting sleep. To be honest, after working with Toland, Leo was happy that he slept at all. (But, also, so far, Leo had fallen asleep five separate times in the lab while Toland was still working on something.)  
And, Leo was reasonably sure, the default mood of Aria was exasperated at her guardian’s antics.  
But, despite all of this, Leo found something likeable in him.  
He was so passionate about his research and talked about it with so much love. How he was determined to make a difference, any difference, to do things no one had even thought to do before him.  
The way he praised Leo whenever they got something right and his eyes would light up and Leo felt so, so accomplished.  
If they had known how this would turn out, they would have gotten out by now.

Leo awoke to Aria softly humming something, nestled next to Toland’s head, that was currently laying on the table opposite Leo.  
“Oh, thank the Traveler, he’s asleep.”, Leo whispered, at no one in particular. He’d been awake the past two days, first doing a mission on the moon, for glimmer and to collect some materials, and then processing said materials, which took way too long, even with Leo helping.  
Leo knew for a fact that Toland had stayed awake because Leo stayed right awake along with him.  
“He fell asleep like two hours after you.”, Aria whispered back as she softly floated over to Leo.  
Leo nodded and just looked at Toland. He still seemed tired, even asleep.  
While Leo was looking at him, they noticed that his robe was missing, he was there only in his shit and his pants. Almost simultaneously, Leo noticed a weight on their shoulder.  
They reached up and tugged it into their field of view, examining it. It was, indeed, Toland’s missing robe.  
“It was his idea, y’know, to give you a blanket.”, Aria whispered, hovering next to Leo.  
“I should go to my bed.”, Leo responded and tried their best to stand up as quiet as possible.  
As they were standing in front of the table, the pulled the robe from their shoulders and thought about what they should do with it.  
Aria floated closer again. “He actually like you, you know? He acts like he doesn’t care, but you can see it, don’t you?”  
Leo thought of Toland shushing them to go to bed. Of Toland pulling them down, so they wouldn’t die needlessly.  
Leo lifted the robe to their face and considered that maybe what Aria said was true.  
“The last time he cared for anyone, it went bad. Don’t be like Osiris, please.”, Aria almost begged Leo.  
“I won’t be.”, Leo promised, looking down at the robe in their hands.  
In the end, Leo maybe-sorta stole it. But hey, Toland had given it to them in the first place, right?

Ruin began in small ways.  
Toland’s theories began to descend to places no guardian would willingly go. They got darker and darker.  
He began to talk of weapons that fed on their wielders, that sought, willingly, consciously to destroy, that hungered to devour existence. But for now, and Leo was glad for that, they remained theories.  
Leo woke one day to find a small, purple-blue petal laying on the pillow next to them. Some weeks later, they coughed and a similar one fell from their mouth. Of course, they did not recognize the significance right away, but three petals and a day in the tower library later, they found out what it meant and they did not like it. They repressed any feelings resembling love too closely. Toland needed support right now, but not that kind of support. They would not tell him. He was more important than their health.

Years after Leo met Toland, they were being regarded as a scholar of the hive in their own right.  
Leo was still Toland’s assistant, but he begrudgingly gave his approval should Leo choose to pursue independent research. Leo had not even asked him for that approval, as that was not what Leo wanted.  
They stayed at Toland’s side. (Now, they might have recognized that they were headed towards disaster, but by now it couldn’t be averted.)  
More and more people called Toland “the Shattered” behind his back, spitting it out like an insult.  
Around that time, Leo first saw his blueprints for the “Weapons of Sorrow”, as the hive texts they had discovered together called them.

The first time Leonidas coughed out a whole flower, they panicked a bit. It hurt in their throat.  
The smaller ones could almost be explained away, hallucinations of sleep deprivation. Leo had slept as much as Toland (or as little, depending on how you see it) since their body, their Light started producing flowers.  
But a whole flower? That even hurt to cough up? How could that be explained away?  
It was a brute force way to get them to accept their feelings and confess to whoever they loved.  
And their feelings were unfortunately quite clear. They loved him. They loved Toland.  
Even if he was widely regarded as dangerous. Even if he could only truly love his research.  
(Even if that research was tearing him apart.)  
Leo really did love him. But he could not, couldn’t possibly love Leo. He was sure to reject them. And Leo, Leo knew that they would not be able to handle being rejected. And they needed to keep helping him. So, they kept quiet.

Long months of decay dragged on.  
Leo was coughing up more and more flowers. First, the singular flowers were just closer together, but then they sometimes got attacks where they coughed up two in short succession.  
Maybe, had Toland not be so absorbed in his research, he would have noticed that something was terribly wrong with Leo.  
The first time blood came up with a flower, Leo was only mildly surprised. They had looked up the exact progression of the disease long ago. It was to be expected.  
Toland, meanwhile, built the first prototypes of his weapon and sent out Leonidas to test them.  
Then, he took them back and tweaked them and worked at the blueprints with the help of Leo’s notes.  
After that, he sent Leo out with updated versions.  
He spent more and more and more time losing sleep to this fever dream of almost sentient weapons.  
To say that Leo was worried about him was an understatement, but they recognized the beauty in the destruction those weapons could bring and it wasn’t like Toland was listening to them anymore.

Word reached the City that out at Dwindler’s ridge, a civilian, named Shin Malphur, killed the nightmare known as Dredgen Yor.  
Calling back that hive-twisted nightmare to the City’s awareness was bad. For Toland, his research and ultimately, Leo.  
Suddenly, the Consensus began to view everything to do with the hive with great concern.  
If it could twist the greatest of them all to such a monster, what could it do to less shining examples of guardianhood?  
Toland had began to ramble on as he worked in these last few weeks, having Aria record it as some sort of “journal”. Leo was mostly just around because Toland hadn’t told them to leave yet.  
(And they couldn’t bring themselves to leave. They still loved him. They still coughed flowers.)  
One of his favorite topics became the scrutiny of the consensus. The weapon he was so intently working on began to take a more refined shape under his hands.  
(Years later, Leo looked back on these weeks and wondered how much they still could have changed, could have stopped at this point, by dragging Toland up the right path, even if he would kick and scream. The answer was: nothing at all.)  
Leo was so worried for him.

Toland took the last prototype out for testing himself.  
Maybe he didn’t trust Leo anymore. That thought stung.  
But then again, maybe he never really had. That thought stung more.  
When he returned, he declared the weapon finished and called Leo in to celebrate.  
“I’ll call it Bad Juju.” Toland told Leo. “Isn’t it beautiful?”  
And Leo had to agree, it was beautiful, in the way that orchestrated, regulated destruction was beautiful. Leo could see the path this weapon would cut and it was bloodier than it needed to be.  
This weapon, this thing was a herald of bad news.  
(Later, that night, Leo having fallen asleep on the table, like in old times, and Toland, drunk on success, he whispered: “It is yours if you want it. All of it.”)

When the consensus accused Toland of heresy against the Traveler and the Light, it came as no surprise.  
What did surprise Leo, though, was that the Bad Juju, this weapon that Leo had seen almost the entire creation of, was one of the main pieces of evidence.  
(Was this why he had completed the last prototype by himself? Because it was heresy and he knew that?)  
They were a part of the trial, of course, being Toland’s assistant and all, but they hadn’t known of the truly heretical things that he had done, that were being brought to light.  
(Why had he hid this? Did he not want Leo to know? Did he not want to incriminate Leo? Had he wanted to protect them?)  
Toland stood straight before the Consensus, looking each and every member in the eyes, almost as if he was demanding respect.  
His verdict did not seem to come as a surprise. He took it with grace, dignity. He did not falter under it.  
Exile. Befitting the crime of heresy.  
Before being led out of the meeting hall, the improvised court, he looked at Leo one last time and smiled at them. Strained, but it was a true smile that reached his eyes.  
It was the first time in months Leo had seen him truly smile.  
Leo could feel their heart break.  
(In reality, what they felt were the roots that the disease brought with it forming.)  
Almost, just almost, Leo followed him into his exile, but if he had been so careful to hide his heretic work from them, then he couldn’t want them to follow him.

Leonidas helped sort through and pack up the stacks upon stacks of writing he had left behind. Nothing from the recent months, as he had switched to audio recordings and Aria held all those.  
But it was still so much. It felt surreal. Distant. As if all of this wasn’t truly happening.

That evening, they found Cayde-6, new hunter vanguard, who had stopped growing brilliantly bule cornflowers in his chassis two weeks ago, when Andal Brask had been killed by Tankis, the Scarred.  
Together, they drowned the night in alcohol.

A couple days before disaster struck, the vanguard received messages about it. But as soon as they figured out they came from Toland, they were dismissed as the mad ramblings of an exiled warlock.  
(Often, in the aftermath, Leo wondered if these messages would have truly changed anything, had the Vanguard heeded them. Probably not.)

Mare Imbrium, as Toland had predicted, was a massacre.  
Leo was just glad they managed to leave the moon alive.

Decades down the line, Leo learned what truly happened.  
When Eriana-3’s firetime descended into the hellmouth.  
They went to kill a god, kill Crota. At least, most of them.  
The team had taken Toland as a guide.  
The only thing they knew when it happened was that they stopped coughing up flowers.  
(But they couldn’t believe Toland was dead. Aria would never let himself get truly killed. He couldn’t be dead.)

But the disease did not lie. The man Leonidas loved had died.

**Author's Note:**

> please direct blame at a friend of mine, they kept encouraging me as i yelled about this fic at them


End file.
